64% of IT leaders believe that it is their job to deliver agile infrastructures above anything else, a report from OpsRamp has found.

Based in California, the service-centric AIOps platform, OpsRamp, has today launched the paper Adapt or Perish: The OpsRamp Report on Modern IT Operations in the Digital Age, in which it reports the findings of an investigation into the current and future challenges of IT operations.

The investigation

The study was carried out on 250+ IT leaders from firms that have at least 500 employees in North America. The main questions it was trying to answer were:

• What are the roadblocks to IT operations modernization?
• What skills are required for effective digital operations management?
• Which metrics are most important to evaluate IT operational effectiveness?

Findings revealed that 64% of leaders believe DevOps is the most essential skill to have in IT. This was placed above other proficiencies, such as cloud certification, ML and even industry knowledge. This is because those adopting DevOps practices are able to experiment with faster and more frequent application delivery improvements.

Furthermore, it was found that almost 60% of organisations rely on the public cloud to run over half of their mission-critical workloads. The cloud is becoming an essential part of tech in order for teams to be fully efficient in digital transformation. Microservice application architects, serverless infrastructures and pay-as-you-go pricing also play a huge role in moving forward digitally.

Budgets have been perceived to be a major block in limiting IT operation transformation, the study also revealed. Teams are thought to be expected to do more things with but with less time, creating a mismatch between goals and actual capabilities.

Identifying challenges

Commenting on the findings, Varma Kunaparaju, CEO of  OpsRamp says: “The OpsRamp Report on Modern IT Operations in the Digital Age identifies the challenges that many of our customers are experiencing,”

“Enterprises want agility, flexibility, control, and the power and promise of the cloud. OpsRamp’s service-centric AIOps platform helps monitor and manage data volume and velocity, and provides these companies with a digital operations command center that allows modern IT operations teams to be more adaptive, unified, and aligned across a hybrid, multi-cloud landscape. What’s more, our native infrastructure monitoring and service context capabilities help maintain business service uptime while reducing the risk of surprise outages.” The CEO continued.